Welcome to the September Fiction issue. Highlights include the 2015 Jolley Prize shortlisted stories: ‘Borges and I’ by Michelle Cahill, ‘Crest’ by Harriet McKnight, and ‘The Elector of Nossnearly’ by Rob Magnuson Smith. Michelle de Kretser writes about Randolph Stow’s The Suburbs of Hell. In this year’s survey a group of writers and critics nominate their favourite ‘missing novels’. Elsewhere, Gillian Dooley reviews Gail Jones’s new novel A Guide to Berlin, Susan Lever reviews The World Without Us by Mireille Juchau, and Catriona Menzies-Pike tackles Miles Allinson’s debut Fever of Animals. We also have Kerryn Goldsworthy on a new biography of Thea Astley and James Ley on a new biography of J.M. Coetzee. Our Future Tense guest is Stephanie Bishop and our Open Page guest is Charlotte Wood.

September 2015, no. 374

Early success is no guarantee of a book’s continued availability or circulation. Some major and/or once-fashionable authors recede from public consciousness, and in some cases go out of print. We invited some writers and critics to identity novelists who they feel s ...

My copy of The Suburbs of Hell (1984) is a handsome Heinemann first edition salvaged, like so many treasures, from a remainder tray. The dust jacket features a golden hourglass and type on a sky-blue ground: the colours Fra Angelico favoured for the vaults of ...